Workbench

04/07/2009

A previously unheard of environmental group, Environment and Human Health Inc., has declared the padded surface beneath Sasha and Malia Obama's new White House playground to be carcinogenic.

The White House has rolled out its own experts, explaining that the playground was designed in collaboration with National Recreation and Park Association, which relied on data from the International Play Equipment Manufacturers Association.

02/18/2009

Brain scans revealed that when men are shown pictures of scantily clad women, the region of the brain associated with tool use lights up.

Most shocking to the female researcher leading the project is the apparent fact that the part of the brain that activates when a human ponders another human's intentions is utterly dark when a man watches a barely clad woman sashay down a tropical beach. According to psychologist Susan Fiske:

"The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."

I beg to differ. It happens to me all the time, even with my wife who I've been married to for a long, long time. In fact, anyone who has ever had any contact with men doesn't need a research project to know that, in the presence of attractive female nakedness, guys are utterly unaware of anything else. Go to YouTube and search "guy walks into a pole" and see how many hits you get.

Fiske and her co-scientists reached the obvious and unsurprising conclusion that women are better than men. Again, anyone who has met both men and women would reach that same conclusion without having to fill out a grant application, just by watching us eat. Still:

Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that women tend to look for
mates who have wealth and power, so some of Fiske's colleagues have
suggested running a similar test where women are shown pictures of men
next to expensive cars or other affluent symbols.

But Fiske doesn't think such an experiment would work the same
way, because women usually react to men they desire by "interpreting
their minds, thinking about what they're interested in, and then trying
to please them," she said.

11/24/2008

Hyperion Power Generation is bringing to market shed-sized nuclear reactors that will, initially, bring power to places remote from the modern world.

"There is a strong humanitarian bent to these reactors," said John "Grizz" Deal, Hyperion's CEO.
"This was invented to provide electricity and hot water to remote
locations, where people might not have electricity or clean water."

The reactors generate heat; their skins stay at a constant 500 degrees for seven years, and can be used to purify water or heat steam to drive electric generators.

If the idea of planting nuclear reactors in isolated parts of the world seems like it might be a security risk, consider the basic construction of what the Hyperion is calling the HGP -- the Hyperion Generating Module. (Note to Hyperion: get a marketing department. Translating "Hyperion Generating Module" into HPG does not inspire confidence in your attention to detail.)

The reactors are housed in a sealed steel shell, and are buried far beneath the ground. Extracting one would be a big job, and hauling away a 500 degree, multi-ton nuclear reactor would not be something even a skilled group of thieves could accomplish before a security force could be gathered, trained, take a couple of weeks vacation someplace sunny, catch a commercial flight to wherever and drive out into the hinterlands. And on the off chance someone did manage to steal one, for their trouble they would end up with exactly no weapons-grade uranium.

Max Carbon, author of the book "Nuclear Power:
Villain or Victim," and a professor of nuclear engineering at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, agrees that the security risk of
Hyperion's reactor is minimal.

"This
is low-enrichment uranium, which is not useful for making a bomb," said
Carbon. "If terrorists wanted to get radioactive material they could
get it elsewhere much easier."

I, personally, get a kick out of having a nuclear power expert named "Max Carbon." Next thing you know, Lou Mileage will be talking about gas prices. But Mr. Carbon's point is valid. If terrorists wanted to steal nuclear material for a dirty bomb, it would be a lot easier for them to raid hospitals and industrial sites than it would be to dig up one of the HPGs.

The significance of this technology to remote places in search of electricity is vast, but that's not the most important thing, it seems to me. Instead, the fissionable material at the reactor's core is the real breakthrough.

Conventional reactors use highly purified uranium, which then must be controlled by the insertion of neutron-absorbing carbon rods. The rods are withdrawn or inserted to control the heat generated by the core, and the reactor can be operated at various speeds by manipulating the rods. Rods in, the nuclear chain reaction stops; rods out, it heats up. The problem is, if operators make a little mistake in withdrawing the rods the chain reaction can spin out of control and -- hey presto! -- you've got a meltdown.

The nuclear reaction in the HPG (really, I'm sure it's actually "HPM," and someone on the website made a mistake) is controlled by the fissionable material itself. Uranium is mixed with neutron-absorbent material (hydrogen) at just the right level to keep the reactor burning at a constant rate. Once the core is mixed in the lab, there's nothing for anyone to screw up.

That's the real breakthrough: by applying this same technology on a larger scale -- say, barn-sized rather than shed-sized -- we can resume building nuclear plants without risking catastrophe. Smaller, less obtrusive nuclear plants (no containment dome necessary)
can be built closer to the cities where nuclear energy is needed and Jane Fonda won't have to make any more bad, earnest movies.

The drawback so far is cost: power generated in the HPMs is roughly 10 times as expensive as power generated in coal-fired plants. But seriously: anyone out there think it's going to stay expensive? Does anyone want to claim that, in larger plants where economies of scale take hold, this kind of safe nuke isn't going to meet the rising cost of conventional energy somewhere in the middle?

This is, it seems to me, kind of a test case for how serious environmentalists are about global warming. Nuclear power, of this sort, is safe. It generates nowhere near the waste that fossil fuels generate, and doesn't have to be justified with an economic Rube Goldberg device of carbon offsets.

I'm betting serious environmentalists are going to be lining up in favor of this kind of thing in pretty short order.

09/21/2008

In an initial experiment, subjects were shown a series of images that
included a bloody face, maggots in a wound and a spider on a frightened
face. A device measured the electrical conductance of their skin, a
physiological reaction that indicates fear.

In a second experiment, researchers measured eye blinks -- another
indicator of fear -- as subjects responded to sudden blasts of noise.

People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful
than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and
education were factored out.

The logical result of this highly developed, genetic "startle" reflex is that conservatives will tend to be more oriented toward outside threats than liberals, a reflection of my previously published Theory of Everything.

The study does not deal with the liberal tendency to see the world in terms of personal moral failure, but I don't think it's too big a leap to assume that if you're not bugged much by images of maggot-infested wounds, you're probably focused on something really important. Like, for example, understanding why muggers do what they do and wishing you could do something about the personal trauma that obviously causes them to hit other people on the head and take their money. Maybe a hug would help.

The inward/outward preoccupation is the fundamental disagreement between liberals and conservatives. It infests every aspect of our political discussion, but is nowhere more important than in perceptions of the War on Terrorism. Conservatives are so wound up about a few empowered jihadis that they'll suspend the Constitution and put everyone with a mustache in jail in order to buy themselves a little personal security. Remember back at the beginning of the War On Terror, when anyone who objected to giving President Bush absolute power was subject to lectures like this:

These are people who cut people's heads off with knives! I'd say having someone look up your anus with a flashlight before you can board a plane is a small price to pay for not having your head chopped off! Maybe we should put two lines at airports. In one, trained professionals look up your anus with a flashlight. In the other, you get your head chopped off with a dull knife. I think I know which line you'll pick then, buddy.

I used to get email all the time linking to videotape of actual beheadings. The emailers were convinced that if I would just watch a few more beheadings I'd understand why habeas corpus is a luxury we can no longer afford. I watched. It was horrifying. I still think that today's Republicans are authoritarian bordering on fascist.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to dwell on the actions the United States was taking, and were pissed that conservatives just didn't seem to realize how some of those actions might cause the crazies to get even crazier. I'd cite some comedic examples of liberalism here, but I'm a liberal and generally don't find liberals all that amusing, at least until they go around the bend of self parody, like the lesbians who think they can stop the war by showing their breasts to complete strangers.

The Theory of Everything, which has yet to receive the worldwide acclimation it deserves, notes that these basic inward/outward tendencies inform every significant disagreement between conservatives and liberals.

This is not to say that one side or the other is flawed. A functioning society needs both types of people, those who are attuned to exterior threats and those who are attuned to internal failings. I'd make the argument that we're looking at evolution (or design, take your pick) at it's finest. A society that only had one or the other group of people would be weaker than a society with both, since both sets of challenges are very real and need to be recognized as early as possible.

There are, of course, scientists who dispute the conclusions of the research, just as there are those who dispute my Theory of Everything. They will eventually be humiliated in the public marketplace of ideas. And, since I am a liberal and a Christian, I will forgive them.

09/09/2008

Further consideration of the worst-case scenario at CERN yields this insight: if the nefarious Swiss do, in fact, create a black hole that swallows-up the Earth, that will pretty much be that for the time being. Remarkably little will change.

Think about it: If the Swiss create a black hole that sucks the Earth in, the Earth's mass and gravitational pull will not change significantly; it will merely be compacted into a much, much smaller place. Say, an area the size of Dick Cheney's soul.

Because it's aggregate gravitational pull isn't meaningfully affected by the shrinkage, the Earth will not draw comets and asteroids and cosmic dust into its mass at an appreciably greater rate than the Earth is now. It will continue to orbit peacefully around the sun whether it's the size it is now or the the size of a walnut. Perhaps weirdly, the moon will continue to orbit peacefully around it's now walnut-sized master.

So, to correct yesterday morning's clearly overwrought post, the destruction of the Earth will not cause the destruction of the solar system or, eventually, the Milky Way. In fact, it will cause little disruption at all.

09/08/2008

In Switzerland, Wednesday, they're going to start a scientific experiment that could, theoretically, create a tiny little black hole. The more hysterical among us are worried that this will be the end of not only Switzerland, but also Earth, the solar system and, eventually, the Milky Way. That may be, but I have questions:

1. If a tiny black hole were created, would there be a period of time between it's creation and it's growth to massive levels during which press releases could be issued and news reports broadcast? Would we know we were doomed, or would doom simply befall us?

2. Since a black hole is, by definition, matter of such a mass that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, and since while being sucked into the black hole we would accelerate to nearly the speed of light, and given that General Relativity supposes that as one accelerates toward the speed of light time slows down until, when one reaches the speed of light, time stops, if one were being sucked into a black hole, would one ever actually reach that black hole? Or would one spend eternity merely falling into the black hole at nearly the speed of light without ever actually reaching the black hole?

3. Given questions #1 and #2, is it possible we might find out that we're all going to die and then be frozen in that moment of complete fear and panic, only to stay there forever as time expanded infinitely?

4. Does this remind anyone but me of Rudy Giuliani's Presidential campaign?

04/01/2008

More precisely, they are somewhat oblivious to the emotional subtleties
of non-verbal cues, according to a new study of college students.

"Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women
who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more,"
said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University's Department
of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

07/24/2007

Colloidal silver is an old-time patent medicine hyped in the alternative medicine community as a "powerful, natural antibiotic and preventative against infections" and possibly as evidence of great conspiracy among pharmaceutical companies. Hundreds of thousands of people are turning to colloidal silver and, according to the Harvard Health Letter, are perfectly safe but for one side effect: Eventually, if they take enough colloidal silver they will turn blue.